'A Home With No Roof'

Overview

Initiated in 2023 as part of the artist’s Bachelor of Photography diploma, A Home With No Roof draws on personal history to examine domestic dysfunction. Through carefully constructed juxtapositions of scale and texture, the project interrogates the apartment in which the artist grew up—and still lives—transforming it into both subject and stage.

The series explores how a space intended to be safe and restorative became marked by painful experiences. Those events linger as invisible traces, seemingly etched into walls, doors, furniture, and carpets. Over time, the artist came to personify the apartment as a kind of monster. Once the home of a happy family, it has evolved into a confining refuge for traumatized individuals, where the scars of the past persist within unchanged decor.

At the heart of the project is a desire to reclaim agency. Working with meticulous 1:12 scale models of the apartment, the artist attempts to reconstruct a new domestic space—one that blends childhood ideals, fragmented memories, and adult wounds.

“Building these models allowed me to regain a sense of control over my environment,” the artist explains. “But the objects are always too small, and I feel too large and clumsy. That tension mirrors the frustration of trying to repair something that was never stable to begin with.”

This struggle manifests visually through acts of deconstruction and reconstruction. Fragmented bodies appear within everyday scenes; objects take on bodily qualities or seem deliberately unfinished; compositions hover between stylization and precarity. The artist positions herself as both subject and object, embodying the confusion inherent in dysfunctional homes.

From a distance, the photographs appear welcoming. On closer inspection, however, details reveal discomfort, hostility, and repulsion. This paradox lies at the core of the work: the uneasy coexistence of strangeness and familiarity, where the ordinary becomes unsettling when viewed too closely. The images resist a single reality, oscillating between the imagined world of childhood, the artifice of a dollhouse, and the unresolved perspective of adulthood.

Through A Home With No Roof, the artist undertakes a process of reclamation and healing. The precise reconstruction of the apartment becomes a cathartic gesture—an invitation to reexamine memories, confront childhood hopes, and ultimately lay them to rest.

The project was presented as a solo exhibition in a former apartment space at Espace Images Vevey in 2024, allowing the artist to extend the series by fully merging the exhibition site with elements of her own domestic interior. Site-specific installations were transformed into new photographic works, which, together with the original series, were published as the artist’s first monographic book under the same title in November 2025.